The Round-Tower

Precious (dd 10) and I went on a Mother Daughter trip together last weekend to Chicago.  We went to the Field Museum and saw the Tut exhibit, shopped at American Girl Place and Borders on the Magnificent Mile, saw the Tribune building, the Water Tower, some magnificent sculptures and paintings in the Hilligoss Gallery, the Lego store, several chocolate stores such as Ghirardelli and Godiva, Teavana - where I discovered Precious has excellent taste in tea… she chose the most expensive and rare tea in the store as her favorite… Monkey Picked for all you forum junkies… her Aunt Tracy was so proud, had High Tea at the Ritz, went to the Shedd Aquarium… and walked. a. lot.

As usual on these mother/daughter trips, I learned a lot about my daughter, just as I did with her sisters before her.  I came away awed yet again that she is my child… She is truly unique.

I pray that God helps me to be the mother that she needs… That is the only way I’ll ever be able to rise to the challenge.

Discretion and all that… I went in last night to check the paint job before bed.  I took the curtains in as well.  The paint color was wrong.  It was both too close, and too far off to the background color of the fabric.  Too bland, and too pink. A dear friend assured me that the test sample and paint chip did NOT lie, but deceived me because next to what was ON the walls at the time was so hideous that even the off color looked fabulous in comparison.

So instead of embarking on tape removal and the risks thereof, I headed back to Home Depot.  After more test paints, I found a color I could live with and retrimmed and painted the kitchen.  Once dry, this looked good.  At least as far as I could tell in my current state of exhaustion.  Sufficiently dry, we returned to where we THOUGHT we were last night and began tape removal.  Yes, there had been a bit of paint creep but that was not the biggest problem.  The edge of the tape had allowed about a millimeter of unpainted (read that OLD finish/paint) space between the stained wood trim and the newly painted wall. Considering a solution for such an unexpected problem, I continued to remove tape.  Some places pulled away a bit of paint but nothing that couldn’t be solved by yet MORE work as part of the aforementioned solution for the miniscule but visible line.  Then tape removal along the edge of the counter top and backsplash began.  This time, up to one inch strips of paint were pulled off with the tape.  At this point, my relentlessly positive perspective went straight down the toilet. 

Claiming discretion is the better part of valor, I gave up and voiced my intention to save up money and have this job professionally done.  Dh is not convinced this is necessary.  I will be praying that God allows him to be convinced or the past four days of intense work and exhaustion ending in much poorer quality paint results than I’m used to achieving will not only extend indefinitely, but a whole ‘nother can of worms will be opened as well.

Sigh.  I didn’t have any trouble painting the house we moved out of for the buyers when we were moving up here. How much you wanna bet if I had WAITED and lived with hideous colors and painted for someone ELSE it would’ve gone just fine. *mutter sputter*

No. I am NOT artistic.  I’m painting my kitchen.  Well, FIRST I had to strip wallpaper. Two different kinds.  I started with the low border that went around the breakfast area.  Paper Tiger, some hot water/vinegar mxture sprayed on, and it came off… easy peasy.  It was with hope (liberally laced with trepidation) that I tackled the heavier looking - but just as tacky - wallpaper that made up the ‘backsplash’ in the kitchen area.  Imagine my delight when it came off almost as easily as the other.  With relief, I handed the job over to my eldest daughter and headed to Home Depot for paint supplies.  I was pleasantly surprised to find the job well done and complete upon my return… until I began working on taping off so I could begin priming.  I found that the backsplash wallpaper was peeking out from beneath the upper cabinets.  Upon questioning, Kenna informed me that the paper had extended up behind the cabinets (obviously) and that she had great difficulty removing it as much as she had.  It took another two hours, more of the hot water solution, and some needletip tweezers to get enough removed from up behind the cabinets so that it was no longer visible and the backsplash could be properly painted.  Speculation on how hard it would be to find the idiot contractor who installed cabinets over at LEAST an inch of wallpaper ran rampant. 

As if that weren’t enough, the area below the paper in the breakfast area was painted one of the most repulsive shades of teal I’ve ever seen.  Also, in the main kitchen area, someone had stenciled some flowers in the same colors as the tacky wallpaper and the nasty teal paint around close to the ceiling.  So, primer was necessary. Six. Coats. Of. Primer. I have NEVER had a paint that required SIX COATS of primer to cover. Between some of the coats of primer and the final coat of color, I spent over 12 hours straight painting JUST today.  Yesterday was only slightly less intense.  I’m hoping that tomorrow’s inspection will show NO need for a second coat and the tape can be removed from the trim. 

That is where the third chapter of the story will either begin, or end.  The wood trim is stained wood, not painted white.  So if the paint has traveled under the tape, the job just gets ugly.  As if it hadn’t already.  A friend assures me that even in such an eventuality, it couldn’t POSSIBLY look worse than it did before I began.  Some help she is.   

She’s right about one thing.  Even with the blue painters tape still up it looks better than it did.    

Micah (10yo) is into poetry.  Oh, I knew she liked it… mainly because I keep finding one of our big volumes of poetry out around her favorite parts of the house… but who knew she had such good TASTE? (Not to mention the serious pride issues I get from my severely dyslexic child loving poetry. *snort chuckle*)  Today she chose the following poem to use for penmanship practice…

 Even Such is Time by Sir Walter Ralegh

Even such is time that takes in trust,
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust,
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust.
 

We may have to get her some more volumes of poetry for her upcoming birthday.   

Two days down, two hundred to go… give or take a few.  I sit on the couch with the family piled around having finished our second very successful day of the year.  The break was good for all of us and the girls have plunged into the new school year with enthusiasm and endurance.  The discussion we had at the end of last year about grades, grading scales, averages, and GPA’s has stuck with them and they are actively assessing the grade on each paper as it comes back to them.  Kenna is also figuring up her daily average and determining whether or not  it was a ’successful’ day in her opinion which is a massive step in the right direction.  Our days are a bit longer than I’d hoped and we haven’t gotten Latin going yet, but that is fairly normal and hopefully will settle down a bit as things get more familiar and into a groove. Part of the length may be due to a later start in the morning… so once we’re getting into bed on time and up on time that may help. It’s a good start. I pray that it will end up being a good year as well!

School starts back up for us on Monday.  We’re buckling down and tackling some issues from last year in a proactive way.  It is my eldest’s 8th grade year, so it is a positioning year for high school.  I have lesson plans in place, not as extensive as I’d like but then no battle plan survives contact with the enemy so I suppose the less there is the less change is required to adapt to the front lines.

We all will benefit from the return to routine.  So here’s to the last two days of play before reality strikes back.

Are NOT the thrill they used to be.  Ok, they are right out of the box… right before the Spyware attacks etc et al.  I’ve been working hard on getting this years planning done for school, and already had to shove back my start date, only to spend the ENTIRE DAY yesterday on the phone with Dell to fix THREE problems, all software related  A support I had to pay EXTRA for.   . This wasn’t the first snag I’d run into either…between getting the wireless router working with the modem, loading programs and restoring data… much time spent working on getting this up and running. The fact that Dell, in spite of it’s problems, still has the best customer service out there was small comfort… instead it just made me feel caught between the frying pan and the fire, forced to sizzle and like it.

Perhaps today will provide more productive…